Sweetbread Pies

Make shells of puff-paste, and bake them empty. When done, fill them to the top with the above mixture. Have ready a lid for each pie, baked on a flat plate, and lay it on the top of the filling.

Stewed Sweetbreads

After blanching them, extract the pipe very carefully, and fill its place with a stuffing made of cold minced chicken or veal, minced ham or tongue sweet marjoram, nutmeg, grated lemon-peel, and the crumbled yolks of hard-boiled eggs. Fasten the openings with small wooden skewers, and put the sweetbreads into a broad stew-pan with a thin slice of ham under each, and another on the top of each, kept in place by a splinter-skewer. Stew the sweetbreads in the gravy of roast veal, and before you send them to table take out the skewers.

Or make a gravy of uncooked trimmings of veal or beef, stewed slowly in as much water as will cover them well, and seasoned with pepper and salt - or, stew with the fresh meat, as much ham or bacon as will flavor the gravy, (using no other salt.) When all the essence is extracted from the meat, stir in a bit of butter dredged with flour. The flour for gravies should be browned. Strain the gravy, and add any other flavoring you like.

To brown flour, spread it evenly on a large dish or flat tin, and place it before the fire, or in a rather cool oven. Scrape it up from the edges where it will get the brownest. Take care it burns or blackens nowhere. Keep it for use in a dry tin box.

Baked Sweetbeeads

Parboil four large sweetbreads, having first blanched them. When cold, lard them all over the surface, with slips of bacon the size of small straws. Lay them in a shallow pan, putting under each sweetbread a piece of nice fresh butter with a very little flour mixed into it. Pour into the pan a glass of nice white wine, mixed with the juice and grated yellow rind of a lemon. Season also with grated nutmeg. Or for sauce, you may use mushroom catchup, with a little salad oil stirred into it.

If you do not live in a place where nice fresh butter is to be obtained, endeavor to do without butter at all, rather than use that which is strong, rancid, or too salt. Bad butter tastes through every thing - spoils every thing, and is also extremely unwholesome, as decomposition (or in plain terms putrefaction,) has already commenced. Rather than use what makes all your food taste worse instead of better, try to substitute something else - such as beef or fresh pork drippings, suet, lard, or olive oil; or, molasses, honey, or stewed fruit. We know that with these it is possible to live in health for years, without tasting butter. Nevertheless, good butter is a good thing, and an improvement to all sorts of cookery.